Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  First, there was the girl standing on the gallery, her hand lifted as if in recognition. In his long experience, Artemus had seen no such girl in the dismal store below Pearl River, and he questioned that he had seen one now. Real or not, the girl was important only for what she brought inside his head at the moment of her passage, one of those random memories that Artemus was always meeting in the course of the day, flung out from the vast spaces where the steady ticking of his watch had no meaning.

  * * *

  A cold afternoon, swirled with snow. A French peasant girl leaves her gate and runs along the column. She goes from man to man, gesturing up the road, crying Le Boche! Le Boche! En avant! The Marines assure her there are no Krauts to their front. They laugh and flirt with her in bad French until she stomps rearward in her clumsy wooden shoes. Then, a little farther on, the scouts discover a prize: behold, a horse-drawn five-nine stuck in the freezing mud, gun and limber and crew all alone on the forest road, left behind by their own fleeing infantry. Le Boche! The Kraut gunners are distracted, lashing the horses, straining at the wheels, when—en avant!—the Marines come howling up the road with fixed bayonets. They shoot and stab until no Kraut is left wanting to surrender, then caper like feral children around the gun. They unhitch the horses and watch them run away, great platter-sized hooves kicking up snow and mud. Someone cranks the gun barrel to full elevation; the Artist rides the muzzle up and drops a hand grenade down the bore. After the breech is blown, the Marines scavenge the dead for souvenirs, especially the much-coveted long-barreled artillery model Luger. No Lugers are found, however: only worthless script, photographs, and letters no one but Squarehead can read. Squarehead, whose real name is Wurtz, is from southern Illinois and fluent in German. He is useful in trench raids, luring the enemy in his own tongue, and useful for bullying prisoners, but he has no interest in letters, so they are left to flutter away along the road. Artemus and Gideon Kane stand together amid the shambles, breathing hard, watching the letters blow away. One of the vagrant pages fetches up at the feet of the French girl who had come back up the road. She is standing with her wooden shoes pressed close together, shawl wrapped tight about her, shivering. When Gideon speaks to her, puts out his hand and takes a step, the child begins to scream. She stands in the road shrieking, and nothing the Marines can do will make her quiet. They leave her there finally, but her shrill voice follows them a long way.

  * * *

  Artemus knew that memory was the only vessel that could hold both the girl at Gant’s store and the French girl who had witnessed, at last, one outrage too many. Beyond that, it was useless to attempt any logical connection between them, or any purpose. In fact, he had long ago given up trying to understand the apparitions that visited him.

  The Silver Star pushed deeper into St. Tammany Parish. Artemus leaned out the vestibule window, sleet peppering his cap, and fixed himself in space and time. A house he knew passed by at the end of a long yard, an old hip-roofed French colonial framed in weeping moss. Up ahead, the engine blew for a lonely grade crossing. The “X” of the warning sign flashed by an instant later, and Artemus glimpsed a half-dozen Negro children, wrapped in bright quilts, like a nest of baby birds in the bed of a mule-drawn wagon.

  Artemus slammed the vestibule window, then leaned against the bulkhead and, contrary to regulations, shook out a cigarette and lit it, drawing deep. With the window closed, it was quieter. It was still cold, but without the cutting wind. Sleet was sifted in the corners, and the slush on the deck plates was freezing, so pretty soon the porter would come along with his broom and a little bucket of salt. They were all wary of the salt, for it made a mess of the carpets in the coaches, but that was better than having a passenger slip and break his neck and sue the company. The coach lights had come on now, and the single caged bulb in the vestibule ceiling, so Artemus stood in a gloomy yellowish pool of lumination like that of washrooms or billiard halls. The pane of the vestibule window, streaked and grimy as it was, gave little light; beyond it, the world was a blur of indistinct shapes.

  When the after coach door opened, Artemus supposed it was a passenger, perhaps the porter and his broom. Instead, it was Vernon Stanfield, a Kane cousin and the second brakeman. Stanfield almost passed without noticing Artemus, but the cigarette smell drew him up. “Ah,” said Stanfield. “I been looking for you.”

  “Well, Vernon, here I am,” said Artemus. Both men had to lift their voices above the racket of the vestibule. He and Stanfield looked so nearly alike that they were often mistaken for brothers. “What will you have?”

  Stanfield drew an envelope from his coat pocket and waved it. “This is for Eddie Cox,” he said. “The company will give him a watch, but he already has a watch.” He thought a moment. “I wonder why they do that?”

  “Well,” said Artemus, “a fellow can’t have too many watches, especially when he is retired and doesn’t need the one he’s got. God damned if I know, Vernon.” He bent and dropped the cigarette through a crack between the deck plates. The separation was hardly visible, but the cold swept up through it, and with the cold, the universal smell of the railroad: grease, friction, dust, urine, creosote, dead animals, hot steel, all mixed together in a way that was like no other smell on the earth, and not unpleasant, though some of its constituents might be.

  Eddie Cox, the sight of him in the cab of the 4512, was the second thing Artemus had brought away from the meet at Pearl River. Artemus was troubled whenever a man retired, and Eddie Cox would retire in a few days. That would be the end of him, as it was with all the old men. The job crowded their years, then was gone all at once. There was no easing out, and nothing was left behind. They always had big plans: fishing, playing with the grandchildren, making things out of wood—all the things they’d never had time for. What they did, in the end, was nothing. At first, they would show up at the depot or the crews’ washroom looking for somebody to talk to, telling themselves they still belonged. In a little while, they realized that time had run off and left them, and they quit coming. Then they died.

  Once a man came to this, once he had outlived his dignity and his time, he was a stranger to himself and to all the world. Artemus Kane felt only contempt for such a creature, and a pity that had no kindness in it. He was not proud of the feeling, but there it was. He blamed the old men for reminding him of what he must become himself at last.

  “What can I put you down for?” asked Stanfield, waving the envelope.

  Artemus looked at the ceiling. A fat winter fly was crawling around inside the light cage. Flies were rarely seen on the Silver Star. “A man would do better dying on the job,” said Artemus. “Five dollars. Look in my bag, in the brown wallet.”

  Stanfield made a note on the back of the envelope. “We all got to die soon enough,” he said.

  “We should all die out here,” said Artemus.

  When his cousin was gone, Artemus wondered why he had made such a remark and if he really believed it. Finally, he decided that he did believe it. There was no good way to die on Pelican Road, but usually it was quick, and a man was among his friends, like the Kraut gunners had been on the road. The little French girl had missed that, but Artemus had not.

  The coach door hissed open, and a young woman emerged. Artemus looked at her but did not speak. The woman smiled, then her eyes flicked away when she saw his face. She wore a fur-collared red coat, and a little curl of her dark hair slipped across her forehead in a way that reminded him of Anna Rose Dangerfield. “Is the club car this way?” she asked, brushing at the curl with a gloved finger.

  It was a ridiculous question, for the club car was always at the end of the train. Where else would it be? But no matter. The woman was slim. She had a smell like clean linen that carried over the railroad smell, and her voice carried over the noise. “Yes, ma’am,” said Artemus. “The last coach.” He opened the door for her and felt her brush past him, her eyes turned away. Again he thought of Anna Rose, out there now in the empty spaces.

  The wi
nter fly circled lazily around the vestibule, lighting, crawling, taking off again. When Artemus was married, his wife could never comprehend why he chose to work on the railroad, an educated man from old money who might yet be written back into his father’s will if he would only come to his senses in time. Then Basil Kane died, and two days after the funeral, Arabella hired a Negro man to carry all of Artemus’s possessions—there were not many—out to the yard. Artemus found them when he returned from a conductor’s run on a broke-dick local. His motorcycle was there, too, kicked over in the grass, a single word scrawled on the tank in dripping white house paint: Goodbye. When Artemus lifted the machine, he found another word, one he had not expected, painted on the other side: Why?

  One afternoon, Artemus told that story to Anna Rose while he lay on his stomach on a quilt, and she rubbed his spine with liniment. They were in the drowsy, mosquito-ridden courtyard of Johnny Lozano’s bar on St. Peter Street, with the smell of sewage in the air and a trio of alley cats sporting in the trash cans. Lying next to Artemus was Lozano’s dog, for whom the cats were a matter of interest, though of interest only, for his left hind leg had been removed by a streetcar, and he was no longer active. Artemus had called off sick, this time with a legitimate reason: the day before, he had stepped off a moving engine and thrown his back out again, and now he could barely hobble. Moreover, he had hit the cinders, and his face and palms were streaked with cuts. Around one eye was a yellowish bruise.

  Well, it’s a fair question, said Anna Rose. Why you do what you do, when you could do anything.

  How come you never asked it, then?

  Anna Rose bore down hard on the clenched muscles between his shoulder blades. I said it was fair. I didn’t say it was important.

  It was to Arabella, said Artemus, wincing at the pain of her hard little fists, the sting of sweat in his cinder cuts. The dog was attracting a good many flies, and they had a way of daubing in his wounds. At least the liniment kept the mosquitoes off.

  Let me put it this way, said Anna Rose. Yesterday, you nearly got killed, when you could have been playing golf instead. So it’s a fair question if somebody loves you.

  So that’s why you never asked it?

  She slapped him on the back of his head. So why, already? she asked.

  Artemus made no reply, for, in truth, he did not know the answer himself. This was enough: he knew she would not judge his answer, just as he knew she would listen if he tried to offer one. That, Artemus perceived, was a signal difference between marriage and romance. It was the first time he understood, and way too late.

  * * *

  Artemus left the vestibule and went forward up the train. The consist this evening was impressive: fifteen coaches, a diner, a club car, a baggage car, a post-office car, and four head-end cars of the Railway Express. This close to Christmas, the train was packed, every seat taken. The windows were foggy from the steam heat. All the citizens were well dressed and festive; the dining car was decorated with holly and garlands of pine, and the club car had a lighted Christmas tree cut in the forests of upstate New York. Among the passengers were a good many Army and Navy officers. They were getting more and more of them these days.

  The Silver Star was an extra-fare mainline train running daily north and south, superior to all other trains between Washington and New Orleans. It was a splendid craft, beautiful from the white smokebox of the engine through its Pullman-green length to the open observation platform of the club car. The windows in the washrooms were leaded glass. The seats were plush, the aisles carpeted, the end bulkheads painted with scenes of the French Quarter and of the great plantation houses of Louisiana. The dining car, specializing in Creole cuisine, was one of the finest restaurants in the South, its starched and haughty Negro waiters trained in French service. The Silver Star had its own stationery, its own linens and plates and silverware. Passengers could send telegrams to their boardrooms or wives or mistresses while rolling through the countryside at seventy and eighty miles an hour. A steward was on call night and day to take dictation, and the letter stamped and mailed at the next stop.

  For all its elegance and style, however, the Silver Star was still tons of steel hurtling along on the dime-sized contact between wheel and rail, drawn by a complex machine that was itself a controlled explosion. Mass, speed, and high-pressure steam were the ingredients, and they existed in a fragile balance that required perfection in a world wildly imperfect, required flawless performance from flawed men and women, required vandals and anarchists to resist their natural impulses. These facts were not available to the passengers. The company wished them to believe that they were in no more danger than if they were in a hotel and went to great lengths to ensure their safety and contentment. The illusion was successful. Artemus knew a number of people, including himself, who could not be induced at gunpoint to board an airplane, but he had rarely known railroad passengers to be nervous. Only the trainmen understood that luck was their sole protection, and that any train—even the Silver Star—could run out of it.

  The trainmen guarded that secret, even from themselves. If they thought on it too much, their own luck would suffer. Sometimes that happened. When a man was afraid, he grew self-conscious. He might hesitate or second-guess or fail to act. The irony had played itself out more than once in Artemus’s memory: a man, absorbed in thoughts of his own mortality, forgets to look around him, and that is his death warrant.

  Artemus found his conductor in the second coach, writing in his trip book. Mister Ira Nussbaum was a lean, handsome old man in his seventies, his close-cut hair gone silver, his eyes quick and black. He had never worn glasses, but his handwriting was cramped and awkward because three fingers were missing from his hand.

  Artemus took off his cap and slid into the seat next to Mister Nussbaum, who was riding backward. Artemus did not like to sit that way, for it made him nauseous after a while. The conductor smelled faintly of soap and damp wool and something else indefinable: confidence, perhaps, or the easy mantle of power. Artemus thought of Mister Ralph Little, a freight conductor of such overwhelming dignity that even the weather deferred to him. His only concession to rain was to allow the water to bead on his polished shoes. He brushed aside the heat and cold and strode through the darkest night as though it were an electric arcade. He never raised his voice, never cursed, never had to give an order twice. His presence calmed good men, or awed them; it turned small, mean men into craven wretches; it silenced the loudmouthed, humbled the braggart, drained the powerful of their vanity. By his own testimony, Mister Little considered only Ira Nussbaum to be his equal in the operation of trains.

  Mister Little died of a heart attack in the overstuffed chair he always carried on his caboose. His friends were gathered about him. The flagman, Sonny Leeke, held his hand while he passed and took the old man’s last farewell to his wife and married daughters. Artemus believed that Mister Nussbaum would go in a similar way. He would be borne off the Silver Star like an elder knight, hands crossed over his watch chain, hair ruffling in the wind.

  Mister Nussbaum, then, was among the last of a dying species, along with men like A.P. Dunn and Rufus Payne and Eddie Cox. When they passed, whatever they had been, good and bad, would pass with them—time, another world, a different vision of what it meant to be a man—and there would be nothing to replace. For Mister Nussbaum, the end would be complete, for he had left no kin to follow and disappoint him. His wife, Rebekah, had been ill of cancer a long time, and on Christmas Eve last, she died in the hospital. Ira Nussbaum had her body placed in the baggage car of the Silver Star for burial in New Orleans. He did not lay off that day. He took out the Silver Star himself and worked the whole trip without a word.

  Artemus had forgotten the anniversary until he took his seat by the old man. Around Mister Nussbaum’s uniform sleeve was a thin band of black cloth, awkwardly pinned, his only concession and announcement. Artemus wondered what he should say, or if he should say anything. In the end, he said, “Slidell coming up, Capt
ain.”

  “Is it?” said Mister Nussbaum. He leaned close to Artemus and sniffed the air with his long, chiseled nose, and quivered his white moustache. “My boy,” he said, “if you’re going to smoke on duty, have the courtesy to take a little breath mint afterward so I don’t have to know about it.”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Artemus.

  “You need a haircut also.”

  Artemus passed his fingers through his hair. “My God, Captain,” he said. “You sound like my daddy.”

  Mister Nussbaum closed his trip book and folded his hands across it. “I am your daddy,” he said.

  “Huh,” said Artemus. “And you let mama raise me Catholic? She never mentioned—”

  “It is a figure of speech, Kane,” said the old man.

  “Are you rich?” said Artemus.

  “Not any more,” said the conductor. “I have spent it all on psychiatrists, trying to figure out how such a smart woman as your mother, God rest her soul, could raise such an idiot.”

  “Ah,” said Artemus. Once, in the last days, Arabella had made him see a psychiatrist in New Orleans. She wanted the doctor to figure out why Artemus got so angry at times, and why he broke things. After three visits, Artemus told his wife that it would be just as useful, and far cheaper, to subscribe to the Reader’s Digest.

  “I’ll get a haircut tonight,” he said to Mister Nussbaum. “I promise.”

  The conductor went back to his paperwork, and Artemus looked past him out the window where the woods, the moss, the houses—some of them on stilts now—passed in winter array, made soft and ephemeral in a light the color of old pearls. Artemus spotted a big red-tailed hawk on the company wire, his feathers huffed against the cold, and now and then clouds of white herons, startled by the train, erupted from the marshes. Then Ogee Womack, one of the porters, appeared in the door of the coach. He rocked down the aisle, hands brushing the seat backs. “Sli-dell!” he announced grandly. “Slidell, Lou’sana, comin’ up!”